


contract negotiations (always open with a 'no')

by kangeiko



Category: Pretty Woman (1990)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-03
Updated: 2010-11-03
Packaged: 2017-10-13 01:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After they rescue each other, the fairytale relocates to New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	contract negotiations (always open with a 'no')

New York, wow. Lost child in the city, the skyline looming higher than LA and lights even brighter than she’s used to from the Boulevard. Even the stuck-up bitches are louder here, amplified like life triple X.  
   
Her bags on the floor, they negotiate. The first rule is no money.  
   
She finds this out the hard way when he takes her to his lawyer – his _other_ lawyer – and tries to hand her ten thousand dollars. She doesn’t have a checking account and he’s trying to avoid cash, he doesn’t say, and his pen is on the paper when she tells him to stop.  
   
No money, she says.  
   
It’s not money, he argues. It’s security, he says. I don’t want to have power over you, and the lawyer had already excused himself at this point. It’s not payment for anything, it’s not contingent on anything. It’s yours.  
   
Oh, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, she says, to watch his brow furrow. You can’t _give_ someone power.  
   
She’s grateful he didn’t try to give her more, but she suspects he would baulk at this. Ten thousand dollars is small change for him, she thinks in her Chanel blouse, smoothing down her Hermes scarf. One hundred thousand, one million, more – that’s when you know it’s payment. This is just pocket change, thrown on the street, covering a friend’s meal, nothing more.  
   
She thinks about a world where ten thousand dollars is no big deal, and tries to find an apartment without a job or security deposit. She hopes Kit didn’t blow the whole three thou on drugs, hopes that it wasn’t a mistake. You can never be sure, with Kit, but it would have been worse to hold on to it. She doesn’t want it burning a hole in her pocket out here, a wad of cash from the guy who isn’t paying her fare, not even to New York. (She’s borrowed the money from him, and she’ll pay it back, every cent.)  
   
She’s staying with him while she hunts for her own place, and he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t just _stay_ , permanent fixture in a Manhattan penthouse. It’s not a condo, he says, bewildered.  
   
No parties is her next rule, neatly following on from _why I can’t live with you_ , and _why I can’t meet your friends_ (yet, she says, but he always forgets that part when he recounts the conversation back to her). I don’t want to hide you, he says; why do you need to move out, he asks.  
   
She thinks about living in Edward’s beautiful apartment. She thinks about the maid that comes every morning, and about the hardwood floors and about the endless array of unpronounceable liqueur bottles lined up, unopened, in a cabinet she bets Edward isn’t even aware he owns. She thinks about waking up every morning in a bed bigger than her old room.  
   
She thinks about Edward explaining her presence to his friends and colleagues, and about the warmth of his arm as he guides her to her chair in a French restaurant.  
   
I’m not your wife, she tells him. I’m not your fiancée. I’m not even your girlfriend, not yet. So why would I be living with you, Edward? Why would I be at the party, or the cocktail drinks, or at the restaurant? How will you explain me?  
   
I don’t want to hide you, he says again, stubborn. His mouth is a thin line of displeasure, and he has taken a step back from her. Some men don’t hit, he’d told her, and he hasn’t touched her in anger once – but it’s three weeks, she thinks, only three weeks, and would silence be worse?  
   
No one meets the love of their life on Hollywood Boulevard, she tells him gently. He opens his mouth to reply and she forges on, _I don’t want to be that girl.  
_    
There’s nothing he can say to that and he nods, grim and defeated.  
   
She softens. Not forever, she says, and reaches out to touch his chin gently. She’s tall when she’s in these heels, her back ramrod straight and her head clear, so tall she can step forward and tip his chin up, forcing him to look up at her. Not forever, she says again, and it is all the promise she can make.  
   
The last rule – the worst rule, in some ways – is no sex. He’d been the one to figure that one out, laying it out tentatively on the flight home, her feet pillowed in his lap. No sex, he says, like he hadn’t just spent a week balls-deep in her, however you want to romanticise it. No sex until they’re both comfortable. She wants to tell him she feels pretty fucking comfortable, but she has a couple of martinis in her already, and they’re not even half-way there yet. She watches him turn down his complementary champagne and wonders if the reason he doesn’t drink is because he _does_ , or because he _doesn’t_. Because his daddy drank, maybe; yes, there’s always _someone_ who drank in every teetotaller’s tale, whether it’s their morose past self or their daddy or aunt or best friend, no one turns down every drink like that without a reason. I’m comfortable, she tells him, and wriggles her feet, her toes scrunching to feel him hard. Impressive at this altitude, she thinks, and wriggles again.  
   
His hands are large and warm when he clasps her feet together, too firm to tickle. When you’re _comfortable_ , he says, like it’s some code word she’ll know the meaning behind.  
   
Oh, she says with heavy irony, you mean when I’m _comfortable_. She rolls her eyes.  
   
She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she would have made him wait anyway. She thinks about the bruise slowly blooming across her ribs where she caught the edge of the table as Stuckey shoved her down, and about wriggling her feet in Edward’s lap throughout the flight and then telling him goodnight and retiring to her hotel alone. Not that she has a hotel, of course, but for argument’s sake. She thinks about all the bums she’s dated and how rights to her once seemed to be rights to her in perpetuity, endless, endless, until she’d break up with him or he’d break up with her. She thinks about a bum like her first love thinking he has rights to get in her pants after they broke up, and thinks about a man as polished and powerful as Edward, and what rights he might expect. And so she thinks, no sex, not until we’re comfortable.  
   
I do want to be with you, she told him on the plane, and squeezed his hand. But I’m going to be difficult about it.  
   
I like difficult, he said, and smiled.  
   
In the lawyer’s office, she thinks that he’s changed his mind about that. I don’t want the money, she tells him again. She’s worried about the rent, of course, and she’s already looking for a job; something part-time, something that will let her go back to school, and she’s keeping tabs on every cent he gives her, every meal he pays. She has no cash, nothing to sell of any value but herself, and tuition fees are insanely expensive. No use in being stupid, she thinks, but she’ll pay it all back, if it takes her years. She’s not going to take his money.  
   
But why, he asks helplessly. I want to give this to you. Why not take it?  
   
Because, she says, _I don’t want to,_ and she revels in it.  
   
*  
   
fin


End file.
